I just wanted to say hi and that I have read a lot of posts here, I prefer to stay anonymous, I do not discount the idea of anything or claim that I can explain things, which brings me to my interest in watching documentaries to look for answers. Do you guys watch Unsolved Mysteries? Well I saw an episode the other day about this atheist who apparently went to hell, and I wanted your opinion on it. I can not on my own mind distinguish if it's right or not, I assume Unsolved Mysteries is credible but I still like your opinion as I've read the stuff you guys wrote and some are thoughtful.

Unsolved Mysteries: Atheist in Hell 

Part 1 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ffU5JHBXxo

Part 2 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJte1x_9GE&feature=related

 NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

Such cases are usually reported after an individual has been pronounced clinically dead, or otherwise very close to death, hence the entitlement near-death experience. Many NDE reports, however, originate from events that are not life threatening. With recent developments in cardiac resuscitation techniques, the number of NDEs reported is continually increasing. Most of the scientific community regards such experiences as hallucinatory.

A majority of individuals who experience an NDE see it as a verification of the existence of an afterlife. This includes those with agnostic/atheist inclinations before the experience. Many former atheists, such as the Reverend Howard Storm have adopted a more spiritual viewpoint after their NDEs. Howard Storm's NDE might also be characterized as a distressing near-death experience. The distressing aspects of some NDE's are discussed more closely by Greyson & Bush (1992).

There are many religious and physiological views about NDEs. The NDE is often cited as evidence for the existence of the human soul, the afterlife, heaven and hell, ideas that appear in many religious traditions. On the other hand, skeptical commentators view NDEs as purely neurological and chemical phenomena occurring in the brain. From this perspective NDEs are the result of purely physiological and neurobiological mechanisms.

In a new theory devised by Kinseher in 2006, the knowledge of the Sensory Autonomic System is applied in the NDE phenomenon. His theory states that the experience of looming death is an extremely strange paradox to a living organism - and therefore it will start the NDE: during the NDE, the individual becomes capable of "seeing" the brain performing a scan of the whole episodic memory (even prenatal experiences), in order to find a stored experience which is comparable to the input information of death. All these scanned and retrieved bits of information are permanently evaluated by the actual mind, as it is searching for a coping mechanism out of the potentially fatal situation. Kinseher feels this is the reason why a near-death experience is so unusual.

Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience

I simply believe it to be a hallucination, by the mind in attempting to cope with death, and no more than that.

-Bamaginian